PlayStation 3 thinks outside the box

[xboxtito]

(Reuters) -- While Sony Corp. basks in the success of its PlayStation 2 in the $30 billion-plus-a-year videogame market, expectations are rising that its successor will be out of the box by 2005, in an entirely different form.

Sony remains tight-lipped about the timing of the next generation's debut, but it is dropping some hints about the product's likely shape -- or more accurately, lack of shape.

"We're not thinking about hardware," said Kenichi Fukunaga, spokesman for Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE), the Sony subsidiary that develops and makes the PlayStation.

"The ideal solution would be having an operating system installed in various home appliances that could run game programs," he said.

Fuelling expectations of a 2005 target date is a microchip project among SCE, Toshiba Corp., Japan's largest chipmaker and co-producer of the PlayStation 2's complex microprocessor, and International Business Machines Corp.

The four-year project, code-named "cell" and due for completion in spring 2005, aims to create a powerful processor for home electronics with ultra-fast Internet connections that could, for example, transmit high-resolution moving pictures.

"It's possible PlayStation 3 would come out in 2005, since that's when Sony's cell project will yield something," said Kazuharu Miura, an analyst at Daiwa Institute of Research Ltd.

Broadband, box-free
He added that, by 2005, Japan's broadband infrastructure for high-speed Internet service would be largely complete and Sony would likely have a clearer idea of what kind of online games people want to play.

SCE said it had not decided how to integrate the cell processor into its next game console, but the general idea was to use the chip in Internet servers and home electronics to divide computing tasks among networked machines.

This would give the devices as much processing power as a supercomputer, such as IBM's "Deep Blue" machine that defeated Gary Kasparov at chess, and enable them to handle everything from games to video recording to downloading data from the Internet.

"We've started with boxes -- making boxes to do specific things, but if you have a chip this powerful you can add functions to any box. It's reverse thinking," said SCE's Fukunaga.

PlayStation 2, with more than 33 million machines sold since its launch in March 2000, has dwarfed sales of rival consoles released last year: Microsoft's Xbox and Nintendo's GameCube.

But the competition looks unlikely to let Sony have the next generation all to itself.

In July, the Wall Street Journal reported that Microsoft was considering launching a new game machine in 2003 or 2004 that would cost about $500 and be able to pause live TV and record programs onto a hard drive.

Sony earlier this week launched a home video recorder with just those functions, the first product in its Cocoon line of home electronics that will hook up to the Internet.

sould xbox do the same or what

[Slacker]

it's gonna cost you so much money, think about it. its basically saying you got to network your appliances together to make one huge supercomputer, I don't know about you but Im not buying all new appliances . just make a gaming console, if this is the way Console gaming is gonna go Xbox is my last console, "homestation" sounds cool but if you live in a house where one person wants to watch TV the other wants to game and one wants to record Chubby S**kers #6 to a harddrive you can't do that all at once !!!

[BigGamer X]

This is all a bunch of PR crap. Anybody that knows anything about how computers (and thus, game consoles) work, can see right through it. It's like saying they will have cars that fly, get 2,000,000 miles per gallon, and fold up and fit in your pocket when you're done......all in only 5 years, for only $1 !!!!!! They can make all the false claims they wan't, I remain unimpressed.

[Snoopy7548]

this is a bad idea. first, hardly anyone has home appliances that are computerized. second, even if someone had all that stuff (it would cost a ton of money), how would they network it? they would either have to buy a crapload of cables, or spend a lot of money on a wireless router and all that crap. this is such a bad idea. and where are you gonna play the games? how are the appliances gonna recognize the games? this will make the developers very mad, since they will have a really hard time coding for all these appliances. not to mention installing the software on all of them. its gonna be a big mess. its gonna be the biggest flop in history.